USA Today Ethics and the entrepreneur

"All of this begs a question: What are the ethics of entrepreneurship? I had an interesting discussion recently about what private companies that lie, steal and cheat are doing. Are they cheating their investors? Robbing the company bank? Stealing from employees? Lying to customers and investors? Most likely not, but is that because of ethical standards? Put another way, do business ethics differ between private and public companies? Does it matter if you are an entrepreneur or a corporate CEO? Perhaps it does."

"A public company CEO has more leeway in that regard. With the resources of the organization a more considerable distance from one's self-interest, it is easier to embrace the dual slide in morals and ethics that has allowed for greed, "me first" and instant gratification."

The New York Times Boot Camps on Ethics Ask the 'What Ifs?'
[requires 'free' registration]

"Most corporations have long had codes of conduct and have publicized them in employee handbooks and elsewhere. But now, Mr. Seidman said, they are "looking to create ethical athletes out of their managers" who are capable of navigating the gray areas.

Sun is one of the first companies to plunge into the exercise in a big way, by requiring all managers across the globe -- not just those who head financial and legal departments -- to undergo intense training. At the company's boot camp, speakers included Scott McNealy, the chief executive, and other top managers and board members. But most of the content was presented in a small-group format; executives had to wrestle with dozens of case studies in which there were no right or wrong answers."

redux [12.18.02]
Wired Magazine Google vs. Evil

"Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel's site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil.

Very Star Wars . But what does it mean?

" Evil, " says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil.""

redux [11.22.02]
HBS Working Knowledge Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift

"Overall, though, my experience has been that probably half, and maybe even two-thirds, categorize ethics mainly as a risk management issue. These managers tend to see corporate values as a tool for preventing misconduct with its incident legal, financial, and reputational risks. Ethics gets their attention because they want to avoid the high-profile missteps and billion-dollar losses experienced by a Salomon Brothers, Bridgestone/Firestone, or Enron.

In recent years, however, I have seen more attention being paid to the positive side of ethics. More managers are waking up to the ways in which positive values contribute to a company's effective day-to-day functioning, as well as its reputation and long-term sustainability."

redux [09.20.02]
Fast Company The Secret Life of the CEO: Do they even know right from wrong?

"Perhaps we understand now. Or we're starting to. The corporate CEO is not the epic hero we once imagined. Now we know: He was never as smart or as right or as, well, together as we had hoped. His teeth aren't perfect either. But let's not go overboard: He's also not an epic sociopath. CEOs are only as culpable for all that has gone wrong with business in the past year as they were responsible for all that went right in the previous years. Which is to say that whatever they have done or failed to do doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain most things.

The truth behind the current episode of corporate comi-tragedy has plenty to do with the men ( and they are mostly men ) who are running the show -- but not in the way that we've always thought. All of our post-Enron hand-wringing about CEOs having values and "walking the talk" isn't wrong, exactly. It's just that it's not exactly right either. The truth is more shaded than that."

redux [08.06.02]
SiliconValley.Com As valley boomed, pressure blurred ethical boundaries

"Now it's Sunday morning across the nation, and CEOs are being hauled one after the other to the confessional. But the focus on rogue CEOs leaves out a wider picture: Many executives such as Rodek, who consider themselves honest, say they worked in the middle of tremendous pressure to stretch, if not break, the rules.

In an environment where some buffed the numbers, the price of doing the right thing was high and the payoff small. Companies that kept to the straight and narrow risked seeing their all-important share price doomed to mediocrity, making it harder to keep employees, raise money, compete with upstarts or even survive.

``It's not all greed,'' said Rodek, whose Sunnyvale company makes business software. ``Part of it is just competition. Business is a battle you either win or lose. There is no middle.''"

redux [07.09.02]
The Washington Post Sleaze and the Slump

"The WorldCom scandal is the latest building block in a new economic mythology. By the old mythology, the Internet and the "new economy" promised a rising stock market and anxiety-free prosperity. The new mythology holds that we've been mugged by corporate greed, which depresses stock prices and devastates "trust." In some ways, this is reassuring. It allows us to believe that purging dishonest executives and enacting the proper reforms will make things right. Unfortunately, it's also false."

"Morality tales are seductive. They express legitimate outrage. They're simple and understandable. It's right vs. wrong. Get rid of the bad guys, and the good guys can win."

"But the very simplicity of morality tales can be misleading."

redux [06.16.02]
SatireWire Remaining U.S. CEOs Make a Break For It

"Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

"They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters.""

ElectricNews.Net Consumer stance on paid content shifts

"New research in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Sweden has revealed that 41 percent of European Internet users still refuse to pay for content on the Web. However, this figure has improved from 47 percent a year ago.

Moreover, research firm Jupiter has said that users who have a broadband connection are "significantly" more likely to pay for on-line content compared to those using dial-up. According to the firm, about 25 percent of broadband Internet users said they would pay for music over the Internet, compared to just 18 percent of narrowband (dial-up) users. Similarly, about 18 percent of broadband users claim they would be willing to buy video over the Web, compared to a mere 11 percent of dial-up subscribers."

redux [10.11.02]
BBC News What surfers are doing on the net

"Over half of Europe will be online by 2007 according to a new survey but there are still question marks about what surfers will be prepared to buy on the net.

Jupiter Media's European Online survey revealed that by the end of 2002 only 10% of Europeans will have paid for content online."

redux [04.22.02]
The New York Times Pay Features Gather Steam on Web
[requires 'free' registration]

""The smarter bears in the bunch will be testing different products at different price points this year," she said, noting a recent Forrester survey indicating that one-third of Internet users would be willing to pay for online content next year.

But that means two-thirds of Internet users are not willing to pay for information or services online, which is why Ms. Allen stopped short of exhorting media executives to block off key areas of their Web sites immediately and start charging for entry. Rather, she said, media executives and others hoping to cash in on the subscription trend "have to start acting less like a media company and more like a retailer.""

redux [03.19.02]
Wired News Pay for Content? Ha, Say Users

"To online publishing and entertainment firms looking to start charging for their content, there was a simple message from today's Jupiter Media Forum: Don't hold your breath."

"Seventy percent of online adults surveyed by Jupiter, he said, can't understand why anyone would pay for any online content.

"If anything, people are less willing to pay than they were 18 months ago," he said."

DotComScoop In search of a viable subscription model

"As some of you will be aware, I'm a major critic of 'negative' subscription models. Time and time again we have witnessed websites introduce subscription services that represent nothing more than a closure of existing content.

There are a few exceptions - one being the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) whose subscription model is to my mind flawless. They kept their exist proposition entirely unchanged and brought in a high quality advanced option designed perfectly to cater for a specific sector of their audience. Furthermore they have undertaken to continuously improve the subscriber experience, aggressively seeking user feedback.

IMDB and others have demonstrated that you can introduce a subscription service in a positive manner, and succeed, so why don't more websites follow their example?"

redux [01.15.01]
Seattle Union Record Was 'free' such a good idea?

"As Microsoft, along with everyone else, wrestles with the challenge of how to make money on the Internet, you cannot help but wonder if Bill Gates & Co. regret a pivotal decision in the evolution of the Web.

When Microsoft decided in 1995 to make Internet Explorer and fold it into Windows, the action more than any other may have cemented the concept of OfreeO on the Internet."

"Microsoft won the browser wars but in so doing indelibly emblazoned in usersO minds the conviction that nothing on the Internet should cost money."

Evan Williams Pricing Matters

"Back when I did direct marketing, we were well-aware that people were irrational about pricing. The only way to really find out the right price for a product -- especially an information-based product, for which prices can be so arbitrarily set -- was to test a few, by sending different offers to random samplings, and see which resulted in more profit. Actually, it would be unusual if more than one (or any) of the prices produced any profit at all. And the results were all over the map. A higher price could sometimes bring in not just more money, but more orders, because of the increased perceived value. Then again, a price 20% lower could increase sales by 100%. You could guess but never know, and you were often surprised.O

redux [11.23.01]
The Christian Science Monitor Four different approaches to e-publishing

"While the concept of e-publishing (as most people think of the term; in the strictest sense, everything on the Web could qualify as e-publishing) hasn't exactly set the world on fire, it is still the 'early days.' And like so many things on the Web, is still sorting out its proper place and 'mode of delivery.' The following sites reveal four different approaches to e-publishing - and whether through odd coincidence or 'environmental compulsion,' each one parallels a familiar method of software distribution."

Online Journalism Review Online News Users Have to Pay

"I've been listening to online-news people talk about it with much interest ever since I was laid off 6 months ago as the managing editor of a regional news site for an Internet Industry portal. Most of the old pros say it won't work. The consultants say about the same thing. The Suits? Well, they just don't say.

Yet, people have paid for print newspapers for ages and they don't seem to mind. So what's so different about online-news?

At this point, I think that online-news users have to pay, it's as simple as that."

Web Techniques Inside Salon Premium

"The Web's great free-for-all is coming to a sudden, sharp end. Under today's market conditions, Web companies can no longer expect to sustain themselves by losing ever-larger sums of money to gain ever-larger slices of market share. As more traditional business yardsticks take hold, many companies face the difficult decision to charge for some of their online content and servicesNand users have begun to accept that they can no longer get everything they want or love for free.

Sure, the Web continues to offer a vast, unprecedented array of gratismaterial. But professionally produced sites need to pay their bills, and relying on advertising alone is a risky proposition in an economic slump. As senior vice president of editorial operations for Salon.com , I've become very familiar with these realities. For content sites like Salon.com, charging for subscriptionsNonce considered anathema on the WebNis now an essential move for survival."

NPR: Morning Edition 'What Should I Do With My Life?'

"Most attempt to answer it with one eye open, one eye closed. We let our fears govern our decisions; rather than challenging the validity of those fears, we accept the boundaries set by those fears, and end up confining our search to a narrow range of possibilities, like the guy looking for his car keys under the streetlight because he's afraid of the dark. Some broad examples: we confine ourselves to a range that is acceptable to our parents or our spouse; we confine ourselves to places inhabited only by people "like us," meaning of our class and education level; we place too much emphasis on being respected by an imaginary audience; we shy away from avocations that take a long time to mature and pay off.

I was inspired by people who had overcome these fears to look beyond the obvious choices."

Fast Company What Should I Do With My Life?

"Your calling isn't something you inherently "know," some kind of destiny. Far from it. Almost all of the people I interviewed found their calling after great difficulty. They had made mistakes before getting it right. For instance, the catfish farmer used to be an investment banker, the truck driver had been an entertainment lawyer, a chef had been an academic, and the police officer was a Harvard MBA. Everyone discovered latent talents that weren't in their skill sets at age 25.

Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper -- a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer. Of course, there's never a single right answer. At some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful."

The Globe and Mail In South Korea, it's the mouse that roars

"The winning candidate in last week's South Korean presidential election had little need for mass rallies or traditional campaign tactics.

When Roh Moo-hyun's organizers wanted supporters to vote on election day, they simply pressed a few computer keys. Text messages flashed to the cellphones of almost 800,000 people, urging them to go to the polls."

"With the world's highest penetration of high-speed and mobile Internet services, South Korea is at the cutting edge of technology that is transforming the political system, making it more open and democratic. It could be a preview of the shape of Western democracy."

redux [05.10.01]
First Monday The Impact of the Internet on Myanmar

"In the present paper, I explore how the Internet has affected the flow of information between in and outside Myanmar (Burma). I show that there is a strong difference between the way information was presented before and after the introduction of the World Wide Web."

"In my study, I examine two political events in Myanmar connected to student uprisings, in the hope of documenting how the Internet - as an easily researched symbol of modern communications - may be affecting the political strategies of one of the last isolated states."

redux [01.20.01]
The Guardian Unlimited Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution

"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to the streets of the capital, Manila, in scenes reminiscent of the 1986 uprising which ousted the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos."

"Most people heard about the planned swearing-in of Ms Arroyo via the text messages, the same means that galvanised a spontaneous uprising on Tuesday evening, when Mr Estrada's impeachment trial collapsed after he bullied and bribed senators to block the admission of vital evidence."

"The text message doing the rounds late last night said it all: "I guess we've won again."

redux [11.29.00]
NPR: Morning Edition Cell Phone Rally

""NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the latest in the effort to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Filipinos send 30 million cell phone "text messages" daily- more than anywhere else in the world. Activists are using the technology to organize rallies and respond instantly to the latest corruption charges. (5:19)""

redux [07.07.00]
The New York Times Manila's Talk of the Town Is Text Messaging
[requires 'free' registration]

"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.

"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."

"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."

The New York Times: Editorial/Op-Ed The Boys in the Bubble
[requires 'free' registration]

"I'd like to believe that those of us who witnessed the tech bubble will be smart enough to prick the next bubble that comes along before too many investors get duped. Encouragingly, some improvements have been made; CNBC now usually identifies whether a banker it is interviewing owns stock in or does business with the companies being discussed on the air.

But in more skeptical moments, I fear that the rise of any boom sector in the American markets will bring with it an attending press that is at least compliant, if not out-and-out boosterish. Editors and reporters need to be able to resist the notion that any single development in technology or business creates a new economy that defies traditional laws of business. That's not a problem that the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress can solve."

redux [06.04.02]
Salon "It was just stupid"

"This was a valuation bomb, not a disclosure bomb. Enron and Global Crossing -- those are issues of disclosure. They simply didn't tell us how bad things were. If you go back and look at all the dot-com prospectuses, they're filled with how bad things are.

The great Wall Street promotional machine accentuates whatever happens to be the mood of the public. Wall Street was complicit and the public was complicit and the companies were certainly complicit and the venture capitalists were complicit.

It takes all of those to make it happen."

redux [05.10.02]
Forbes Cramer's Troubles Could Get Worse

"The transcript includes some eyebrow-raising anecdotes relating to Cramer's cozy relationship with CNBC television personalities Maria Bartiromo, David Faber and Mark Haines."

"In some instances, according to the taped interview, Cramer would call the anchors with a possible news lead on a company after he had already established a position in that firm. Says the trader in the taped interview: "Before he'd call Maria maybe we'd buy five or ten thousand shares of something. You know, the name that he was about to mention. He would position the firm so that when it did come out, it would be the positive or negative short or long, depending on, you know, what information he gave.""

Business2.0 Who's to Blame for the Dotcom Insanity?

"And yet, as compared with previous bubbles -- say, junk bonds in the '80s -- the dotcom fiasco owed relatively less to Wall Street's lack of ethics and relatively more to willing contagion by the public itself. "The market wanted these stocks," Blodget observed to CNBC, and Blodget was right. By the millennium's waning months, it was common, for example, to see engineers in Silicon Valley with CNBC in one pop-up window on their computer screens and their brokerage accounts in another, and they would -- or so I'm told -- trade all day and scarcely attend to their jobs.

Of course, the financial press -- CNBC in particular -- fanned the flames, but faulting it or any other group misses the epidemic nature of the contagion, which naturally infected the whole of society without distinction."

SatireWire MEDIA CONVICTS MEDIA OF UNFAIRLY CONVICTING MEDIA IN MEDIA: MEDIA

""Lately it has been popular in the media to try and convict the media for exaggerating the importance and influence of the media on issues such as the economy and the Internet," said the report's co-author, recently retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw. "We in the media felt it was time to take a look at the way the media has been looking at the media looking at the media's coverage, and we were appalled at what we found ourselves finding ourselves finding out about ourselves."

The report, however, drew immediate criticism from Shaw, who blasted himself in a two-hour televised panel discussion."

redux [03.13.01]
The Washington Post Who Blew the Dot-Com Bubble?

"Henry Blodget, Wall Street's loudest cheerleader for Internet stocks, made it to the front page of the New York Times last week. And thereby hangs a tale about the media and the bubble."

"For it was the mainstream media -- which now take such delight in scolding those involved in the dot-com mania -- that helped push the idea that anyone could get rich by playing the market.

"The media invented Blodget," says Christopher Byron, a columnist for Bloomberg News and MSNBC. "In a bull market everyone loves to cheer, and Henry Blodget was everyone's first phone call. . . . Where were they when companies were trading for 150 times revenues? They were repeating the words of these guys. It's disgusting."

The New York Times Librarians Trade `Shhh' for `Va-Va-Voom'
[requires 'free' registration]

"As pinup calendars go, it has many of the standard features: models in black leather perched on beefy motorcycles. But the men and women on display here aren't exactly firefighters, or the Girls of "Baywatch," or any other known species of cheesecake or beefcake."

""We wanted to show people we've changed," said Nancy Dowd, the head of public relations for the library system, who snapped the photos with her Olympus C-3000, a digital camera. "People's ideas of librarians is conservative, and this just blew it out of the water.""

redux [06.17.02]
The New York Times Battle Over Access to Online Books
[requires 'free' registration]

"When Internet song-sharing services created digital jukeboxes of free music, book publishers raced to bolt the door to their own archives of copyrighted works.

Many librarians, on the other hand, thought the idea was pretty exciting.

Now, new technologies are igniting a similar battle closer to home. Librarians have seized on the potential of digital technology and offered users free online access to the contents of books from their homes, and they are squaring off with publishers who fear that free remote access costs them book sales."

redux [03.25.02]
The New York Times Law Limiting Internet in Libraries Challenged
[requires 'free' registration]

"This morning in a Philadelphia courtroom, a coalition of libraries, Web sites and library patrons will begin nine days of hearings in which they will ask three federal judges to help decide a seemingly simple question: What is a library for?"

"They argue that a law passed by Congress in December 2000 requiring schools and libraries to use Internet filtering software changes the nature of libraries from being places that provide information to places that unconstitutionally restrict it."

The Washington Post Pat Schroeder's New Chapter

"And who, you might be wondering, is giving Schroeder and her publishers such a fright?

Librarians, of course.

No joke. Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers face in the near future -- economic downturns, competition for leisure time, piracy -- perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material."

redux [08.23.01]
The New York Times Librarians Adjust Image in an Effort to Fill Jobs
[requires 'free' registration]

""It's time for us to work on advocating for libraries to change the image," said one of the "21st Century Librarians," Veronda Pitchford, an African-American librarian in Chicago who wears dreadlocks, enjoys in-line skating, practices yoga and listens to eclectic music. "I want little kids to know that this is an option. I want little girls to see me."

Ms. Pitchford, 30, said that even in an age when computers may be leading children to forget the human touch of a librarian, there is no substitute.

"When I say that we're the ultimate search engine," she said, "I'm not joking.""

redux [07.12.01]
News.Com Library "radicals" targeted in latest copyright battles

"Gone are the days when a librarian's worst offense was hushing patrons one too many times."

In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free."

redux [04.09.00]
Dan Gillmor Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight

"HEROES OF FREEDOM: They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet"

"Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet."

NPR: All Things Considered Uncloaking Terrorist Networks

"Homeland security warriors at the Pentagon and the CIA say the next terrorist attack may be prevented by investing in data-mining -- the science of finding patterns in colossal amounts of information. Companies are lining up to supply the government with the equipment to process the raw data. NPR's Larry Abramson reports."

The New York Times Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running
[requires 'free' registration]

"In the Pentagon research effort to detect terrorism by electronically monitoring the civilian population, the most remarkable detail may be this: Most of the pieces of the system are already in place.

Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals."

redux [04.02.02]
First Monday Uncloaking Terrorist Networks

"To draw an accurate picture of a covert network, we need to identify task and trust ties between the conspirators. The same four relationships we often map in many business organizations would tell us much about illegal organizations. This data is occasionally difficult to unearth with cooperating clients. With covert criminals, the task is enormous, and may be impossible to complete."

Business 2.0 Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta

"It's also clear that this network would have been hard to dismantle. A hub-and-spoke network, where there is no contact between nodes except through a central figure, is an easy target: If just the central node is destroyed, the network disintegrates. Network analysts say a highly centralized network typically can be taken down by eliminating about 5 percent of the nodes. But the diffuseness of the hijacker network means that it won't suffer significant damage until the six nodes with the most numerous and important connections -- 21 percent of the group -- are removed."

"To draw an accurate picture of a covert network, we need to identify task and trust ties between the conspirators. The same four relationships we often map in many business organizations would tell us much about illegal organizations. This data is occasionally difficult to unearth with cooperating clients. With covert criminals, the task is enormous, and may be impossible to complete."

redux [11.10.01]
Business 2.0 America's Secret Weapon

""That's the kind of thing this war needs," says Claudia Kennedy, the four-star Army general who was deputy chief of staff for intelligence until her retirement early this year. Analyzing networks requires maximum information -- phone and bank records, police, FBI, and other intelligence files -- on suspected terrorists and their associates. "You have to get everyone to agree to put in their data," Kennedy says. And if anyone balks, well, "you don't always have to ask for permission," she says.

Through such work, the topology of al Qaeda is slowly coming into focus -- and it's not a pretty picture for the United States."

NPR: Morning Edition Terror Networks

"NPR's Joe Palca examines the academic discipline known as "social network analysis," which has potential for tracking terrorist networks that are known to exist and uncovering others that were previously unknown. Law enforcement agencies already use the techniques, but broad implementation could raise personal privacy issues. (7:07)"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS "watch list" -- and being hunted by the FBI -- when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar's suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn't already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built -- it's called Golden Shield, and it's been designed by the Chinese Communist Party's police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield's tactics."

redux [09.27.01]
Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [09.14.01]
Red Rock Eater Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

"War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified."

"The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

News.Com Hot links, cool trends on the Web

"Schatz said search terms also are reflecting the increased Web activity of teenage girls. Anything related to the prom or a young, male actor is on the rise, he said. "It's really amazing how many searches those heart-throbby actors get," said Schatz, who lists "Hulk" star Eric Bana and high-school basketball star LeBron James as hot commodities for the coming year."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

Ananova Internet searchers 'stuck in the nineties'

"The UK's internet users are stuck in the nineties, according to a new survey."

"One interesting year-end finding came from AltaVista, which unlike most other search sites does not filter out generic terms. According to the site, the word "sex"--always a top search term on the Web--posted the biggest decline among surfers during the holiday season."

redux [12.08.02]
The New York Times Postcards From Planet Google
[requires 'free' registration]

"Google is taking snapshots of its users' minds and aggregating them. Like a flipbook that emerges when successive images are strung together, the logged data tell a story."

"Despite its geographic and ethnic diversity, the world is spending much of its time thinking about the same things. Country to country, region to region, day to day and even minute to minute, the same topic areas bubble to the top: celebrities, current events, products and computer downloads."

The New York Times Magazine Approximating Life
[requires 'free' registration]

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."